Looking For Death- The Soldier

A Soldier.

My life had been mundane up until the war had been declared. I had lived with my parents and younger siblings. Life had been simple. Beautiful.

My life now imitates a hell-hole, somewhere that couldn't even amount to being liveable. Dismal conditions and diseases filtered through the dank air, swallowing me. Here is a snippet of what I scrawled in my diary with shaking hands while the sky cried down on my sorry figure:

"Many died. No survivours crawled back into the blackened trenches. Everywhere was silent."

When I went Over The Top, I was extremely lucky I wasn't caught in a rifle attack or bomb dropping. Although I suffered only a few minor physical injuries, my heart and my brain will be forever scarred.

Everything was in slow motion, caught in a timetrap that was full of a whirlwind of dust and screams and guns. Bullets shot through the air, whizzing past my mud-covered face. They lefta hot, metallic-rust smell after them. A smell that infected my lungs.

Everything was monotone, a black and grey. Smoke clouded the lying corpses in the stained snow, crimson seeped into the very veins of the Earth. I've seen friends fall, all emotion, thoughts and feelings drained dry from their body. They were all jst dead faces now.

They were all just the same.

War strips the Earth of humanity.

No Man's Land will always be a deceased place.

No trees will grow,

No plants will blossom,

No people will live,

No animals will hunt,

In this Land of the Dead.

I still remember everything about my family. When you know there's so much fragile distance between you and your loved ones, you can't help but recall everything about them. I remember the way my sister used to took her hair sub-consciously behind her ear while she was reading intently, the way my father smiled to himself when we were all laughing round the table.

Everything about my family, my life, clogged my head, thick and suffocating.

I was drowning in my memories.

Raucous booms of thunder reverberate around the sodden trench walls. A stench, foul and unrecognisable, wafted in the air around me. The smell of devastation. Corpses lie stranded, their faces stripped of all life.

Nothing.

I've gone mad. This war is ambigious. Nothing makes sense, one thing collapses into the next and I'm lost. I can't find my way out, I'm trapped here. Forever and always. I can't even tell whether it is day or night. Everythings muffled, and I'm dying slowly.The frontline echoes with the tale of dead soldiers who died with dignity.

There's a sudden 'whoosh' from the air above us. Bolts of lightning throb. Screams and shouts of panic and agony from my fellow soldiers etch into my brain forever.

As there's a thunderous crash and a flash of electric, crimson light... a bomb falls.

Infra red, ultraviolet light exploded across the death-filled trench.

Men die.

Spectrums of colour pulse behind my eyes, agony striking my body.

I'm falling, falling, falling.

Gone.